Recently, music projects that in former times would have required an array of professional studio equipment can now be completed in a home or project studio, using a personal computer and readily available resources. A personal computer with a fast processor and enough RAM can serve as a workstation for recording, arranging, mixing, and producing complete music projects, which can be played back on the computer, burned on a CD or DVD, or distributed over the Internet.
A user of such a program for producing complete music projects can choose among a lot of alternative window arrangements depending on the workflow he wants to conduct. There are, for example, different window arrangements for editing a selected track or for showing the mixer to manipulate different channels.
One feature which is commonly used for music production is cycle recording. Cycle or loop recording means that a specified time interval is successively recorded several times. Each of these recordings is saved in a separate track. Afterwards, it is possible to cut and paste material of those different tracks manually together to one final music section in one track. This process of putting together a final music section in one track out of these cycle recordings is called “compiling”.